Eyeing the World – Climate Musings

Category Archives: Datasets

Post navigation

And also how – in the process – it shows the new RSSv4 TLT series to be wrong and the UAHv6 TLT series to be right.

For those of you who aren’t entirely up to date with the hypothetical idea of an “(anthropogenically) enhanced GHE” (the “AGW”) and its supposed mechanism for (CO2-driven) global warming, the general principle is fairly neatly summed up here:

I’ve modified this diagram below somewhat, so as to clarify even further the concept of “the raised ERL (Effective Radiating Level)” – referred to as Ze in the schematic above – and how it is meant to ‘drive’ warming within the Earth system; to simply bring the message of this fundamental premise of “AGW” thinking more clearly across. Continue reading →

The officially published global temperature records all converge on a total temperature rise since the late 19th century of about 0.9 (0.8–1.0) degrees Celsius:

Figure 1.

But to what extent can we be confident that this is how the ‘global average surface temperature’ (GAST) anomaly actually evolved over this time frame?

The truth is: We can’t. At all.

This is fundamentally a matter of data coverage, but – just as importantly – it is also a matter of methodology. How do you make up for a paucity of data? How do you properly compile, weight and interpolate data into a reliable “global average” when that data – the actual observational information that you have collected and thus have at your disposal – provides nothing like a full global coverage? And how do you make this “global average” of yours consistent over time when your data coverage (both in total and in spatial distribution) vastly changes over that same time frame? What basic assumptions will you have to rely on? Because, make no mistake, an interpretive undertaking such as this will crucially have to rest on a foundation of some rather sweeping presuppositions. Continue reading →

It appears I was right 😎

33y TLT→OLR connection confirmed!

Turns out the results from my last blog post were challenged even before I published them. In a paper from 2014, Allan et al., the alii notably including principal investigator of the CERES team, Dr. Norman Loeb, went about reconstructing the ToA net balance (including the ASR and OLR contributing fluxes) from 1985 onwards, just like I did; in fact, it’s all right there in the title itself: “Changes in global net radiative imbalance 1985–2012”. I missed this paper completely, even when specifically managing to catch and discuss (in the supplementing post, Addendum I) its follow-up (Allan, 2017). The results and conclusions of Allan et al., 2014, regarding the downward (SW) and upward (LW) radiative fluxes at the ToA and how they’ve evolved since 1985, appear to disagree to a significant extent with mine. I was only very recently made aware of the existence of this paper, by a commenter on Dr. Roy Spencer’s blog, “Nate”, when he was kind enough to notify me (albeit in an ever so slightly hostile manner):

In 2011, the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office replaced their global sea surface temperature series, HadSST2, with a new one, HadSST3, an upgrade allegedly necessitated by, among other things, the particular ‘discovery’ that the recorded temperature evolution of the global ocean surface had, since about 1979, for one particular reason followed a path that trended artificially low. The official global sea surface temperature data as compiled simply showed too little overall warming. Since 1978-79, that is, during the satellite era.

This is funny, because the Hadley Centre’s own official global SST dataset, HadSST2, already showed an overall warming since the late 70s that was much larger than the other official datasets out there, like ERSST, Reynolds OI and HadISST:

Animation 1.

Note that the new ERSSTv4 series is also included in Anim.1 (red curve), and that it distinctly supports the group of ‘others’: The light blue HadSST2 curve all of a sudden makes a giant upward leap of nearly 0.1K at the 1997-1998 transition (light green vertical line). There is hardly any divergence to be observed between it and the others, however, either before or after this point (save that from ERSSTv4 post 2005; more on that later …). Continue reading →

First the SW (that’s measured reflected SW at the top of the atmosphere (ToA), basically an expression of Earth’s albedo). TSI (incoming sunlight) at the ToA minus reflected SW (albedo) at the ToA equals the ASR (“absorbed solar radiation”) at the ToA, the actual radiant HEAT (net SW) transferred from the Sun to the Earth system as a whole:(ERBS Ed3 + CERES EBAF Ed2.8 vs. ISCCP FD; tropics, 1985-2004 (20 years).)Continue reading →

Figure 1. Original found here: https://tamino.wordpress.com/2015/12/11/ted-cruz-just-plain-wrong/

A good month ago, the perennially unsavoury character calling himself Tamino once again tried to hold up the spotty “global” network of radiosondes (weather balloons) as somehow a better gauge of the progression and trend of tropospheric temperature anomalies over the last 37 years than the satellites, by virtue of being essentially – as he would glibly put it – “thermometers in the sky”.

So his simple take on the glaring “drift” between current surface records and the satellites over the last 10-12 years is this: The surface records are right and the satellites are wrong. Why? Because the surface records agree with the radiosondes while the satellites don’t! The radiosondes implicitly – in his world – representing “Troposphere Truth”.

And so, when your starting premise goes like this: the radiosondes = thermometers in the sky = troposphere truth, then any “drift” observed between them and the satellites (as in Fig.1 above) will – by default – be interpreted by you as a problem with the latter.

To repeat Tamino’s fairly simplistic reasoning, then, in the form of some sort of logical-sounding argument: Surface and satellites don’t agree. Radiosondes and satellites don’t agree. But surface and radiosondes do agree. Which means the latter two are right, their agreement robustly verifying the ‘rightness’ of each. (And also, the radiosondes represent “Troposphere Truth”.) Which leaves the satellites out in the cold …

There is, however, a definite issue to be had with this line of argument.